With this year’s publication of Western Trails, the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) completed the most recent overhaul of its Forest Preserve Series of hiking guidebooks—and the club is already hard at work on the next edition of the series. ADK’s hiking guidebooks used to divide the Adirondack Park into six regions. The club has pared that down to four regions (still covering the entire Park). In addition, ADK continues to publish a separate guidebook for the Northville-Placid Trail. The regions have been reconfigured to coincide with National Geographic’s Trails Illustrated maps for the Adirondacks. Western Trails, for example, describes the >>More

By Phil Brown The Adirondack Park has more than two thousand miles of hiking trails. In theory, this means it has more than two thousand miles of trails for running, too, though you aren’t likely to encounter people jogging up Gothics, say, or Basin Mountain. What trails are suitable for running will depend on the runner’s strength and ability, but if you’re looking for suggestions, you’ll find plenty in a new guidebook by Spencer Morrissey and Corenne Black. It’s the only book of its kind for the Adirondacks. Adirondack Trail Runner describes more than ninety routes that the authors have >>More

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is a paradox. It’s been around forever, but it was “completed” just four years ago. Whatever, we’re glad it exists. The NFCT is a 740-mile water trail that follows Native American paddling routes. It starts in Old Forge and ends in northern Maine, after passing through Vermont, Quebec, and New Hampshire. This includes sixty-two carries, totaling fifty-miles. You can paddle it in the other direction, but it will require more portaging. The nonprofit Northern Forest Canoe Trail Inc. has done a great job of promotion. Over the past ten years, the group has put up >>More

What’s a mountain climber to do once he or she has summited the Adirondack Forty-Six, the Catskill Thirty-Five, and the Northeast 115? Create a new list, of course. And so we have the Adirondack Hundred Highest—the obsession of hard-core hikers who don’t mind surrendering a few pints of blood in their quest to stand atop the region’s tallest mountains. The Hundred Highest includes the forty-six High Peaks first climbed by Bob and George Marshall and their guide, Herb Clark, in the first quarter of the last century. All of these peaks now have marked trails or obvious herd paths, so >>More

You might think the Adirondack bookshelf already has enough hiking guidebooks, but there’s always room for one more if it’s well done. And the latest one is. Falcon Guides has just published Hiking the Adirondacks ($18.95) by Lisa Densmore, a freelance writer and nature photographer. It describes forty-two hikes, chosen from all parts of the Adirondack Park. Densmore is more than qualified to offer advice: she grew up in Saranac Lake and has been hiking in the Adirondacks since she was a young girl. Although she now lives in New Hampshire, she has a summer camp on Chateaugay Lake in >>More

In 1987, David Goodman got a dream job for a ski bum trying to survive as a freelance writer: the Appalachian Mountain Club hired him to write a guidebook for backcountry skiing in New England. The following year the club published Classic Backcountry Skiing: A Guide to the Best Ski Tours in New England. Unlike most ski-touring guidebooks, this one focused on down-mountain runs rather than rolling terrain, and it came out just as telemark skiing was enjoying a rebirth. Goodman later expanded his horizons westward, and in 1999, AMC split the book into two volumes, one covering New Hampshire >>More